In order to increase the wireless market to the greatest extent possible, wireless service providers and wireless equipment manufacturers constantly seek new ways to make wireless equipment and services as convenient, user-friendly, and affordable as possible. To that end, wireless service providers and the manufacturers of wireless mobile stations, such as cell phones, and fixed (or stationary) wireless terminals, frequently work together to streamline procedures for enrolling and equipping new subscribers and for improving the services and equipment of existing subscribers.
One important aspect of these efforts involves over-the-air (OTA) provisioning and upgrading of wireless mobile stations, such as cell phones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), wireless hand-held computers, two-way pagers, and the like, as well as fixed wireless terminals. OTA provisioning is a relatively new feature that enables a new subscriber who purchases a new cell phone (or other wireless device) to set up a new account with a wireless service provider and to configure the new cell phone for operation. The OTA provisioning procedure is mostly automated and often does not require the new subscriber to visit a cell phone service center. Typically, the new subscriber removes the new cell phone from its box, calls a special purpose telephone number (given in the instructions), and performs an interactive provisioning procedure with an automated agent or a human service representative.
The over-the-air (OTA) upgrading of a wireless device also is a relatively new procedure that enables a subscriber to download and install upgraded software containing patches, bug fixes, and newer versions of the software, including the operating system, stored in the wireless device. The wireless service provider or the mobile station manufacturer, or both, may provide the upgraded software.
It has long been possible to download and to install software upgrades for a personal computer (PC) via the Internet. However, this process is considerably more complicated in a mobile station. A personal computer has far more resources available to perform a software upgrade, including dynamically linked libraries (DLLs), a memory management unit (MMU), and a large random access memory (RAM) space. A conventional PC software upgrade may be partitioned and downloaded to a personal computer as a group of shared objects.
In contrast, a wireless mobile station (e.g., a cell phone) typically has far fewer resources available than a PC. Mobile stations lack a memory management unit and code is not executed from RAM. Code is executed out of a Flash memory (or other non-volatile (NV) memory) that acts as a read-only memory (ROM). The Flash memory generally cannot be written to, it can only be re-programmed with great difficulty. These resource limitations greatly complicate OTA software upgrade operations in wireless mobile stations.
Additionally, OTA software upgrade procedures became more complicated with the appearance in the cellular market of cell phones containing two central processing units. For example, Samsung® is delivering dual central processing unit (CPU) phones in Korea. In a dual CPU mobile station, a main (or primary) CPU executes the radio frequency (RF) communication functions and call processing operations of the mobile station. The main CPU also may be referred to as the modem CPU. A slave (or secondary) CPU executes user interface (UI) functions and end-user applications on the wireless mobile station. These user applications may include a word processing application, a calendar application, a video game, an e-mail application, and the like. The slave CPU may also be referred to as the multimedia CPU. In this manner, the software that runs on a conventional wireless communication device is split into two parts in a dual CPU mobile station. Currently, there is no OTA upgrade procedure that addresses the upgrading problems that are peculiar to a dual CPU wireless communication device.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for improved systems and methods for performing automatic software upgrades of wireless mobile stations and fixed wireless terminals that incorporate a dual CPU architecture.